


Tennessee

by cimorene



Series: Burn & Tennessee [1]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Established Relationship, First Time, M/M, UST, roadtrip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-03
Updated: 2009-12-03
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:14:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cimorene/pseuds/cimorene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Viggo and Orlando's journeys - during filming, the path to a relationship, and two roadtrips in Tennessee. Secondary, background pairing Sean A/Elijah UST.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the Mountains

It's too late now.

It seems that he thinks a lot. Viggo spends a lot of time doing whatever he wants to do, and a lot of times he wants to do things like drink tea, write poetry, go camping, and sit outside waiting for something to present itself to him to be painted.

After the premieres of _The Return of the King_, they continued to meet for several years, all of them, here and there. He still keeps in contact with Elijah and Sean, because it's too easy not too, but he doesn't do it as often anymore.

At the end of filming, it seemed inconceivable that they would drift apart, no matter what reason and experience and Sean Bean told them. Drifting happens, and coincidence and apathy prevent people from meeting, but all it takes is _effort._ Their friendships would last forever. They would all miss each other too much to let that happen. They would not lose each other.

After the party at the last premiere, it still hadn't occurred to Viggo that a day would come when he would feel he _couldn't_ call _any_ of them. Least of all Orli.

Somehow he has missed him all this time without speaking to him, and now he has let it become so long that he realizes--as soon as he finally determines he needs to see or hear him, that he should, that he will--that he can't.

Or rather, that he he shouldn't.

Nothing has changed, except that his need has built up and taken him to the breaking point. He knows that that is what has been happening--for years, he's been waiting for that to happen. Nothing is different. He and Orli are the same people, and he feels the same, even if he didn't know quite what he felt at the time, and evidently, though he's a little older, he's no wiser. They are still as far apart as ever. All the same _shouldn't_'s that made them shy away from this _more_ then still apply.

Viggo stands next to his kitchen table, which is something of a mess right now because two days ago, he was trying to learn batik. Finally he pushes aside a rumpled paper bag of beeswax and a sheaf of computer printouts and picks up his cordless phone anyway.

He calls Elijah.

* * *

"Are you insane?" Says Elijah affectionately.

"Maybe," Viggo says softly, his standard response to questions like that, except when he's in a particularly scary mood and says "yes."

Elijah lets a beat pass before he says in a tone of exasperation, "But it's the middle of the winter, you friggin' idiot."

Viggo wonders if he has spent Christmas with his parents: on the set, he would have said _fucking_, likely as not. "That would be a good reason," says Viggo, "not to hike the Appalachian trial, or not to climb down the inside of the Grand Canyon, or not to walk from Colorado to West Virginia carrying all your belongings in a knapsack."

"A _knapsack_?" Interrupts Elijah.

"A knapsack," says Viggo, who doesn't rephrase things just because other people have problems with them. "However, I have suggested none of these things. I promise that there is central heating in the cabin."

"Mm," says Elijah doubtfully, "I think New Year's is something of a family time for Sean, but I'll give him a call if you want to check out the cabin."

"Thank you," Viggo replies graciously.

"Not that I'm promising to go if he can go then."

He is lying, of course. Elijah is a pushover, and ridiculously easy to read. Viggo used to just think this was funny, or occasionally useful. Now he hasn't seen Elijah for more than a year and a half and the mere sound of his voice is making memories rush back--memories of New Zealand. Memories of everyone. Like Orli.

But he knew that would happen. "I understand," he tells Elijah. They are going to the cabin for New Year's, if there's any way in hell Elijah can cajole and bully Sean into it. Viggo has no doubts. Elijah is a pushover for anyone. Sean is even more good-natured and considerate than Elijah, but has a certain point beyond which he would never budge--except for Elijah.

Viggo envies them, each of them, their straightforwardness. He envies the simplicity and openness of their relationship. It's special and sweet. It would work. Wouldn't it be easier, if they could be like that?

They never could have before, and they never can.

He has to stop thinking of himself and Orli as "we."

* * *

They never shared either one of their places regularly, although Viggo slept with Orli and Orli with Viggo often enough. They were never regular or predictable at all. It worked.

Sometimes big groups of people went out and drank, of course. They usually split apart into smaller groups when people started to leave. Viggo left as often as not; sometimes he stayed around with Sean Bean, or Ian, or both, or with the hobbits. The hobbits, of course, generally included Orli.

The first time, he had been watching Orli, and when they all left the pub, he eyed the brick wall and then the alley and thought about it. He could pull Orli back into the shadows there and see if he would allow himself to be kissed utterly senseless and if his mouth tasted as intriguing as it looked. Orli was the type to go if you just said, "Orli, come here for a second," probably whether or not he suspected what you wanted. He seemed the type to allow himself to be kissed senseless at least once even if he didn't swing that way.

Then there was the meandering walk around as they looked for cars. Viggo was the only one of them sober enough to drive, but he didn't decide to point this out until they'd been wandering in search of Dominic's car for nearly ten minutes. Orli's hair was short and bristly, very recently-shaven then and just starting to grow in. Viggo wanted to see its texture in the palms of his hands and on his belly and his thighs.

"Orli, wait," he could say, and turn him in the street and kiss him. The hobbits were probably drunk enough that they wouldn't remember.

Viggo didn't risk it. He drove them back very carefully, and Orli seemed to move rather slowly when he was drunk, and to find his reflection in the glass doors of the motel disproportionately fascinating. They were the last two into the lobby, and in the stairwell, Viggo said softly, "Orli."

He turned swiftly and not unevenly, and stood without moving, watching, when Viggo closed the gap between them. However, it wasn't until the mouth was parting sweetly under his lips that Viggo realized Orli wasn't nearly as drunk as he'd supposed.

Sometimes they fucked after trips to pubs, and sometimes they just messed around. Sometimes they didn't. Every now and then they found one another in the morning or the afternoon, when they were free, and inexplicably fell to kissing. Very rarely, they stayed in the hotel instead of going out with everyone.

The first time, Viggo had no thought of the second time; and the second time, he had no thought of the third time. His thoughts of Orli were the kinds of thoughts that made him sit down right away to write poetry or draw, muse-ish thoughts that seized hold of him and didn't relax their grip on him until he'd painted Orli's stomach with his tongue or screamed his energy in orgasm to the ceiling or the sky with Orli's mouth or his body around him. He could sate them, though, when he sated his body and filled his eyes with Orli's ridiculously graceful perfection, and they'd leave, only to return unpredictably.

The fourth time, Orli came looking for him and found him fishing, in costume. He managed to get most of Viggo's costume off with his teeth, and fucked him hard on a bed of grass, with the fishing pole lying forgotten nearby.

Orli read all of Viggo's poetry, but none of it until after the first time. It didn't seem to matter; they became real friends, close friends, but the friendship and the other rarely mixed.

* * *

It's not cold in Viggo's house in the winter, but he makes tea anyway. It feels like the kind of thing you do in the winter, and he did it even before New Zealand and his constant exposure to   
Brits. Even Brits like Orli and Dom and Billy--they all drank tea. He wasn't sure if there were any who didn't in the whole country.

He has finished cleaning the batik out of the kitchen, but he has a lot of it in a cardboard box just inside the door to his art room (otherwise known as the spare bedroom). He didn't ever manage to boil the rest of the wax out of the silk. He would probably give it up as helpless but he can't bear to ruin a length of silk. Viggo used more wax than he would have if he'd realized it would be this hard to get it out, but it's too late now, and if he ever manages, it will be very pretty.

There's something about visual art that poetry and writing can't capture, and there's something about crafting something with your hands, really _making_ it, that goes beyond sketching and painting and photography.

Viggo leans against the kitchen counter, sipping a cup of tea, and flips through the last few pages of his journal. They're filled with short entries of a few sentences each, disturbingly disjointed. He never felt particularly upset at any one time, writing them, but they make him uneasy now, and he puts the journal away before he even finishes the cup of tea.

Three cups of tea are gone before Viggo has a complete and coherent thought. He can't quite remember what he was thinking about before that, other than the words "England" and "New Zealand" and some vague images, and feelings of warmth. The phone rings.

It's Sean, saying very cheerfully that his wife doesn't have a problem with them camping (well--cabining?) over New Year's. "Fantastic," Viggo replies, enthusiastically, and "Your wife is unbelievable," because it seems appropriate.

"Isn't she?" Sean beams. Viggo can tell he's beaming.

"So do I need to call Lige?" Viggo asks, even though he's pretty sure of the answer.

Sean sounds surprised, "No, I'll tell him. Just let us know when you know the details."

"I can give them to you right now, and you can tell Lige when you call." Viggo picks up a pen and starts to doodle on the corner of the piece of paper he wrote them on, even though he basically remembers without looking at it.

"Oh--that was fast," says Sean doubtfully.

Viggo touches the side of the teapot, and it is cooling, so he puts the kettle under the tap and fills it again. "Well, I was going to cancel if you couldn't," he says, after a break that was probably too long, to be polite.

But he and Sean understand each other: Sean laughs. "I understand," he says, "just let me get a pen. --What are you doing?" Viggo has bumped a glass with his elbow, trying not to spill the kettle, and it tipped mostly-empty into the sink and broke.

He says ruefully, "Making a mess. Don't worry about it; just get your pen."

"Okay. Shoot."

Viggo starts to give him directions, but Sean stops him and asks for a date. "When's good for you?" Viggo asks.

* * *

People knew about them, but they didn't talk about it. Orli and Viggo didn't really talk about it with each other. What the others knew was very small, in fact: some morning sightings of them leaving each other's rooms (three they knew of), some witnessed kisses, some rumpled clothes. For the rest, they probably guessed a lot, but there was no telling how accurate their guesses were.

If Viggo tried to define it, he was forced to guessing himself, because the truth was that it was very lopsided and changeable and ambiguous. He didn't try, for the most part, though. He looked for Orli sometimes, and sometimes they fucked twice and woke in the middle of the night and fucked again, long and slow, and woke up wrapped around each other, early, and tried again, but found out they were too tired and laughed and just made out instead. Sometimes he walked beside Orli in the forest talking, and sometimes they walked together on the set or between scenes not talking. Sometimes they went almost a week without seeing each other. Viggo went days without giving it a thought.

Then sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night alone, agonizingly hard, thirsting for Orli so much he murmured his name out loud.

* * *

Tennessee sounds deceptively Southern, but there are a lot of mountains in it. Viggo has only ever been to his aunt and uncle's cabin in the summer and the spring, and the last time he was there was almost ten years ago. The heater works, he keeps reminding himself, as he drives a rented Jeep into what he can only describe as "the mountains," although he has always remembered this cabin being described as at "the bottom" of _one_ particular mountain.

"A small one," Aunt Sarah said on the phone, and laughed.

There is snow all around the road. The road has been salted, but not as carefully as some non-mountain roads are. Perhaps it's not even possible to salt this road that carefully. Viggo can see the normal variety of snow plow wouldn't fit on it. Snow is crushed between pieces of gravel when the pavement runs out, like some bizarre kind of close-packed icecream, dirty white, chunks of brown (chocolate?).

He doesn't read Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair very often now, which is to say, even less often than he did before, which is to say, practically never. Those pages of famous people at parties were never very exciting, but now they bother him, somewhat.

He recently saw a picture of Orli with a reed-thin redhead plastered to his arm, grinning so her face split in half with her freckles sprinkled across the apples of charming cheeks. She was beautiful, and stunning in a dress that would have been conservative with four or so more inches of length. Orli was smiling too, a real, somewhat tentative smile, with that peculiar almost-shy look in his eyes that wars so fascinatingly with his showman's front and his rakish devil-may-care grin.

Viggo has encountered other snapshots of Orli like that, and others with girls, but not very recently, and not since he realized it was too late. It was disturbing so soon after, too soon. He still thinks about that, fruitlessly but frequently.

His breath makes a white cloud in front of his face that dissipates when he walks through it, carrying two duffels, one on each shoulder. The lock scrapes a little, but the door opens smoothly. It's the same temperature in the little living room as on the rustic porch, and he still breathes in visible little puffs, but when he pulls back the curtains and the clear white winter sun pours in, he already feels warmer.

Viggo turns on the heat, and by the time Elijah arrives he has brought in a stack of wood, taken off his gloves, and started a fire. Between them, they have supper almost finished when Sean gets there, shaking fresh snow out of his hair.

His apology gets cut off when Elijah barrels into him and his face vanishes into the shoulder of his jacket. They stand there, laughing and crying and patting each others' backs. Viggo reconsiders his assumption that they've seen each other a lot more frequently than he has seen either of them, and only hugs Sean when Elijah has let him go and stepped more than his initial four inches away.

This was good, he thinks over supper; he needed to see them, and the way they keep smiling has kept him smiling since before Sean stepped through the door. Elijah was very proud of the fact that he knew how to make spaghetti sauce, so Viggo had had very little to do except make noodles, which Elijah claimed just made up for the wood Viggo had carried. It's natural that they would start talking about the cast and the movie, of course. He knew it would happen, and he would like to know more about them--he hasn't seen Dom and Billy for some time, but Elijah and Sean saw them a year and a half ago, apparently. Sean is the only one who has spoken to Sean Bean for a while. Elijah has kept up with Ian.

"Have you heard from Orli, recently?" Elijah asks him, and when he says no, Sean does a poor job of concealing his surprise.

"Not since the last time I saw the two of you."

"On the phone?" Sean tries, clearly believing that Viggo has misunderstood.

"No," Viggo says, pleasantly casual, inwardly feeling a peculiar clenching hardness.

"Is he still seeing that girl?" Asks Sean.

"The redhead?" Viggo makes himself ask.

"Oh no, that was a while ago," says Elijah, "but no, he's not seeing--um--Michelle?--anymore either. You know, 'seeing' is a rather strong word to use with Orli."

"Yes, he never really does," Sean agrees, "like you," and Elijah blushes. The conversation is successfully diverted. Of course that wasn't Sean's intent.

But when Viggo says, "It's very peaceful here. I was hoping I'll be able to really think here, and have a chance to center myself," Sean gives him a look that says maybe it was.

"Was that a hint?" Elijah jokes, "Because I'm still planning to get drunk tonight, and you're not escaping."

"Well, it was worth a try," Viggo smiles, and they all laugh.

When he's not drunk, Elijah stretches out on the couch with his feet in Sean's lap, but when he is drunk, he puts his head in Sean's lap. Viggo pushes the armchair closer and puts his feet on the couch too, and he and Elijah play a sort of half-assed kicking game. Sean laughs at this for a while, but then just watches bemusedly. Elijah is far more drunk than that, and no longer as playful, when he returns to the subject of Orli.

He still tries to be tactful, which must be a hard impulse to have in his state, Viggo has to give him that. Sean seems slightly troubled by the question--"So how long has it been since you and Orli, y'know, had contact--spoke or saw each other, or whatever?"--but he also seems slightly interested.

Viggo is not sober himself, which is probably why he says "Too long" instead of "a few years." At least he doesn't say "three years and a month and a half."

"Why?" Elijah asks, abandoning tact.

Viggo frowns. "It didn't seem--I don't know. We're still friends."

Sean says carefully, "You kind of surprised me. I would have expected..." with less beer, he probably could have managed to do this without the doubtful face.

"So you didn't have a fight," says Elijah, and

Viggo says, "There's no problem. We've just lost touch."

"If that's not a problem, then there isn't one," mutters Sean, whose tact may be on the way out.

Viggo frowns again, or maybe he has been frowning the whole time. There's really nothing to say. It is a problem, but he still thinks it is for the best.

"He's really the same," Elijah tells them, thinking he's changing the subject.

"Mm-hm." Viggo thought so.

Sean has a picture of Orli. He is alone in this one, at the premiere of something else, with his hands sort of in his pockets and sort of not. He looks directly into the camera, frankly, not smiling, but not making one of those "posed" sexily solemn faces either. His hair has grown out a little longer than it was at the RotK premiere, and is just spiky enough to suggest styling products. He looks ill at ease. His latest choice of wild shirt emphasizes his lean build and makes him look actually small, which is rare for Orli, though he isn't large.

"He looks sad," Elijah says critically, and he is right.

Sean replies, glancing at Elijah with a look of surprise, "I thought that too."

Viggo nods a little and gives the picture back. "Keep it," Sean offers, and Viggo hesitates, but he can't really refuse. He sets it face-down on the end table.

He sleeps heavily, and when he gets up in the morning it is gone. Later, he discovers this is because Elijah has put it in the outer pocket of one of his bags.

"If it's been too long," Elijah says at lunch without looking at him, when Sean is outside getting more wood, "the longer you wait, the worse it will get."

And Sean says that he's sorry to say anything, and after this one thing he'll shut up, but "It's really too bad that you've lost touch with Orli, of all people. It's easy to lose something like that, and hard to get it."

* * *

At the second to last premiere for _The Two Towers_\--which was either London or New York--Viggo was late to the party before the movie. He walked in briskly, straightening his cuffs. He got about fifteen paces into the room before a bomb shaped like Orli, and smelling fantastic, hit him.

It was a hug, but so much more, with Orli wrapped so satisfyingly around him and piece after piece of Viggo's body awakening to memory, tingling and melting with happiness. Rubbing Orli's back or patting it would have been appropriate, but for a long time they were both absolutely motionless. Viggo's eyes were closed. The first movement he was aware of was Orli's head moving, sort of nuzzling a little, at his neck, and a soft laugh, which he could feel as Orli's breath above his open collar, making him shiver.

Then Orli lifted his face and bestowed the ghost of a kiss on Viggo's lips. They stepped back reluctantly, and Orli went away, but Viggo found him again after the movie, and they stayed together for about half of what was left of the party, including a memorable session of making out among the folds of Orli's overcoat in the coat room, the slippery satin lining under Viggo's hands when they touched the wall next to him and the slippery wet of Orli's mouth on his neck and traveling down his chest as he undid more than half the buttons of his shirt.

Viggo didn't pay very much attention to the last premiere for _The Two Towers_, and he didn't see Orli more than usual, but when it was over he caught Orli's wrist and whispered his room number in his ear.

Orli showed up with his shirt already half-unbuttoned less than ten minutes after Viggo got back, already shaking with desire while Viggo impatiently finished getting the shirt off of him. He was in a frightening hurry to undress Viggo, but when they fell naked together onto the bed he rolled on top of Viggo with a little sigh and relaxed. Finally he leaned forward until his mouth was just over Viggo's and said, "yeah" just before their lips flowed together. It was the first time their mouths had met since the New York (or London) coat room, and they took their time, taking little sips of kisses for a long while with tiny pauses between each one. Then Orli's tongue slipped in to re-learn the contours of Viggo's mouth, and the kiss spiraled deep and wild and wet out of control.

Insatiable. Viggo couldn't feel enough of Orli, couldn't believe the taste of his skin had gotten sweeter, and the dark flash of his eyes had gotten more languidly tempting, the smooth curve of his ribs more beautiful. He followed the sweep of Orli's eyebrows down the sharp high curves of his cheekbones with his lips, his eyes closed. Orli gently nipped his earlobe, and soothed it with a kiss that became the first in a line trailing down his neck and across his chest to his nipple. Viggo arched up into that hot, teasing mouth, choking on words that couldn't decide what they would say, and groaned harshly.

Orli smiled against his skin, and he shuddered and seized Orli's head, holding it still or clutching at it as he leaned over Orli, kissing and kissing and pushing him over onto his back. He straddled Orli's thighs and they stayed like that with him leaning over Orli for long moments while his thumbs traced arcs behind the delicate ears and he plumbed the depths of the clever mouth. Panting at the ceiling, the hot velvet of Orli's cock thrumming in his mouth, jerking at the touch of his tongue. Long fingers tangled in his hair. The long, slim thighs going rigidly tense, the whole beautiful pale body yearning towards him as Orli thrust up into his mouth, crying his name, and spent himself so deep in Viggo's throat he could barely taste it.

Then, with a sigh and a smile, he went liquidly pliant and his legs folded smoothly over Viggo's shoulders, his hands on Viggo's hips urging him close. He positioned himself carefully and tested the relaxation of the small opening with two fingers. Black eyes smoldered up at him as the inner muscles admitted him easily, then gave a lazy, suggestive clench around his fingers. His breath caught; his heart pounded. Viggo sank in slowly, biting his lip, and Orli rolled his hips up encouragingly, his whole body stretching, catlike.

_"God,"_ Viggo said roughly as he pushed the last little bit in and rested there, surrounded in Orli's hungry body. Then they were kissing and moving together, open-mouthed and messily, gasping every now and then, long deep thrusts setting them on fire, short, shallow ones giving them space to kiss each other's ears and necks. In pauses they drew out sweating with anticipation, they laughed breathily.

He pulled back long and slowly, and paused, nearly all the way out, the muscles in his arms straining while Orli murmured, "Come on, damn you." Then he plunged back, faster, in one swift drive, going deep and angling perfectly so Orli was left panting, with his head thrown back, the muscles in his flat stomach jumping under Viggo's caressing hand. He did it again, and Orli groaned. Again, a little faster, and Orli sobbed incoherently, "God" or "Viggo" or some combination of the two.

In the end, after a feverish blur of movement, Viggo was lying on his back with his feet braced, while Orli rose and fell above him, eyes closed with pleasure, his face beautifully flushed. Orli was a wicked tease, lowering himself slightly and pulling back again, slowly rotating his hips, taking Viggo all the way in and resisting any movement but the tightening and loosening of his inner muscles. Finally he gave in to his need and began pumping up and down in a steady, then quickening rhythm. Viggo's fingers dug into his hips, and he was hoarse from shouting encouragement already when Orli stiffened and came, spilling over his thighs and Viggo's belly. That was the end, after a few more emphatic thrusts, and climax swept him up, robbing him of sight and making him dizzy with release and pulsating pleasure.

Orli let himself collapse and he pulled him close, wrapping him tightly in his arms, and held him like that until they both fell asleep.

He woke Orli the next morning with a passionate kiss and wrapped his legs around the slender hips. They were in bed when Viggo's plane left, Orli curled up close behind him with one hand wrapped around his straining erection, buried perfectly still deep inside him, alternating kisses and little bites on the curve of Viggo's neck and shoulder. Viggo lifted one leg further, trying to give better access, and Orli flexed his hips once, smoothly, in response.

Much later, when Viggo whispered "please," Orli had progressed to a gentle even rolling of his hips, the shallowest possible thrusts, and very little of the friction Viggo craved. With that, though, he laughed and kissed the back of Viggo's neck. The rocking sped up, and he searched for a better angle.

And found it. A few strokes against that spot and Viggo was blind with desire, begging for the deep, forceful thrusts Orli quickly obliged him with. One, two--he couldn't breathe any more, then, only feel, and he might have been hoarsely shouting even before he came with Orli still inside.

"What time is it?" Orli whispered some time later, looking at Viggo through slitted eyes though he was in perfect view of the bedside clock.

"Almost eleven."

"My flight's supposed to leave at one fifteen."

"Screw it," Viggo said. Orli laughed, delighted, and they had sex again in the shower, with Orli's back up against the wall and water running hot in between them. It didn't take as long as it might have, though, and Orli left in plenty of time to catch his flight, slipping on a pair of sunglasses before he leaned in again for a brief kiss.

They were always very casual. They didn't do anything at the premieres for _The Return of the King_.

* * *

On New Year's Eve they go walking in the snow. They meant to get up early, but when Viggo woke up, Sean was serenely sipping coffee at the table, and Elijah was still asleep. They didn't wake him up: it wasn't that important. The sun is well up when they finally leave. Elijah has the grace to be mildly embarrassed that he's slept so long, but they don't let him talk about it, just tell him to fill another thermos with the coffee that has just finished brewing.

They lose the path when they're among the trees. You can't really see it, because the snow has drifted pristine and thick over everything. The telling moment is when Elijah walks to the side to break an enormous icicle off of a tree branch. "It's huge," he says enthusiastically, flexing gloved fingers around it and licking melting water off of it.

Sean makes a face. "The water's probably not clean."

"You've had kids for too long," Viggo tells him, breaking off a much smaller icicle from near the end of the same branch and biting off the end of it. It shatters between his teeth and his mouth fills with cold shards before they start to melt, his tongue tingling with the cold.

Then when they look back the way they came, they're not sure what direction the path was supposed to go. Their footprints are a muddy carnage on the blanket of snow, though, so they can always find their way back.

"Oh, well," Viggo shrugs. "Shall we go on?" And they do. They drink coffee at twelve thirty seven, and Elijah wants to try to mix coffee and clean snow to make some kind of strange dessert.

"That won't work," says Sean, but he's smiling.

"If you can eat it before the snow melts--" Elijah protests, already wading out into the snow, looking for the perfect handful.

Viggo has done the same thing with maple syrup before: of course, the syrup wasn't hot, and the coffee is. It doesn't work, but Elijah bravely drinks the resultant mixture anyway. "Well," he says philosophically, "the water didn't taste _too_ dirty."

Sean teases, "I don't think they get _too_ much acid rain in Tennessee."

Now Elijah makes a face. "Thanks."

They turn around soon and go back to the cabin ravenous, but too tired to cook anything other than a lot of canned soup. "I brought some bread," Viggo remarks, sitting on the hearth rug and drinking the soup from the bowl, his spoon untouched.

"What about butter?"

He licks his lips. "Mm-hm."

"Some toast would be good," Elijah says wistfully. After Sean polishes off the last of his first bowl, he toasts some of the bread, and they spread butter on it that's so cold it tears the bread.

"It's a good thing we're eating lunch so late," Sean says, "that way we can eat dinner late too, and we won't need an extra meal before we go to sleep."

"Who's going to sleep?" Elijah grins. "It's New Year's."

Viggo and Sean make supper, because Elijah says he wants to save all his energy for mixing drinks. He watches TV for several hours, after a brief complaint that having a television makes the cabin too un-rustic, and that it should at least be decently hidden in a wooden cabinet. Viggo turns it off after a while, though.

Elijah looks at him curiously. "We can watch the ball drop," he says, "but that's where I draw the line. We're supposed to be in the wilderness, Elijah."

Sean has finished setting the table already, because he just dropped a handful of silverware in the center of it and set out three plates and cups. "A wilderness with some really kick-ass coq au vin."

"As long as you didn't use the champagne to make it," Elijah says, closing his eyes, arching his back and stretching.

"Oh," Viggo exclaims, "_That_ was what the champagne was for?"

"Haha," Elijah mutters, after slitting open an eye to see from his face that he really was joking.

Viggo has time to sit by himself on the porch before dinner, thinking, but it's hard to hold on to one train of thought. He isn't even really sure what he needs to be thinking about.

At the end of the last premiere for _The Return of the King_, Viggo thought about catching Orli and kissing him. He considered breaking the long precedent of their whole relationship by starting a conversation about it, even by saying "I'll call you" or arranging another meeting in advance. In the end, he couldn't; they'd been doing it the other way for a long time, and it was too ingrained.

It's hard to hold to one train of thought, though, and finally Viggo gives in and stops trying to think, letting his thoughts bubble slowly and flow out until his mind is almost still. He doesn't have time for any real meditation, though, before Elijah comes looking for him.

Elijah does make some interesting mixed drinks, and some good ones, including some Viggo suspects he has invented. He sets those disposable plastic flutes on the hearth, along with the bottle, where they immediately fall over and roll onto the floor.

"They'd probably melt anyway," Viggo says, amused, and Elijah stands them up but leaves them on the floor. They turn the TV on again at eleven fifty. At midnight, Elijah kisses him on the mouth, a brief, pretty cool kiss. Viggo thinks about raising his eyebrows, but he doesn't until Elijah turns and kisses Sean's cheek, and neither of them can see.

Cheek for Sean?

Viggo has always, out of a kind of respect for them, refrained from speculating.

He pours them all champagne, and gives Sean a kiss too before they toast. The plastic cups don't make that musical clink of goblets so much as a muffled little _click_, but they ignore this and drain them quickly. Elijah refills all three before they've had time to catch their breath, and they laugh and drink again, more slowly.

They don't go back to the mixed drinks until all the champagne is gone. True to his word, Elijah doesn't go to sleep all night, and he doesn't kiss Sean on the mouth until Sean has fallen asleep, on the couch, and Viggo is standing out of sight at the end of the hallway. Even then it is nearly as brief as Viggo's kiss, but more hesitant, and Viggo thinks he isn't imagining the look on Elijah's face.

His throat closes, and he can't clear it to announce his presence until Elijah is sitting next to Sean's knees on the edge of the couch, staring into the fire again. They don't say anything about that, but they talk and don't talk for a long time and watch the sun rise over the snow from the porch.

"Thank you for coming," Viggo says softly, and Elijah squeezes his hand.

* * *

Elijah was the first one who saw anything. They'd been in the woods and lost track of time. Suddenly it was dark all around, the forest thick with shadows so you could hardly move without bumping anything in the pitch black. Viggo knew the way out, and Orli clung to him, making it harder to walk so they stumbled into more tree branches, but they didn't really care, and they emerged into the much lighter twilit darkness out of the shadows of the trees laughing.

Viggo always takes the stairs because it's faster, and because you can always use the exercise. With Orli, it usually was slower, because they stopped sometimes even more frequently than every landing, or tried to walk upstairs with one of them backwards, eyes closed, kissing. Orli was the backwards one that time, and he was still backwards when Viggo kicked open the door to the hall on his floor and they walked down towards his room still kissing. Then he stopped in front of the door of his room, seizing Orli's hands to hold him still, and proceeded to kiss him very thoroughly, touching only at their mouths and hands. Orli stood passive for a moment, but soon enough his hands curled around to grip Viggo's tightly, and he made a soft humming noise in the back of his throat that made Viggo shiver.

Then he saw him. Elijah was standing outside the door of Sean (A--_his_ Sean)'s room, and he had evidently been waiting. Now he was just staring. Viggo met his eyes at an angle, and he blinked and looked down. Viggo untangled their hands smoothly and raised his to cup the sides of Orli's face and break the kiss. Then he unlocked his room and pulled Orli in after him, and closed the door.

He told Orli about it later, the next day, when they were drinking coffee in costume on the set. Orli had stolen his newspaper, but at that he set it down and took a thoughtful sip. "Hm," he said, frowning and looking into the distance, the wind stirring Legolas's long fair hair on his shoulders. His profile was nearly perfect. "That must have been weird for him," he said, "considering," and wouldn't say any more, even when Viggo, after glancing around to make sure they were alone, brushed his hair back and leaned close to kiss his ear and his neck.

He's pretty sure now that he was already in love with Orli then.

* * *

When he's getting ready to leave, after he hugs Viggo but before he hugs Elijah, Sean looks into his eyes and says: "Call him." By that time, Viggo has decided he will. He nods and smiles, and Sean, who was being very brave and thought Viggo might get annoyed, looks relieved before he turns to hug Elijah--or rather, to be captured in Elijah's arms and let Elijah hold him. He smiles at them for a while, but Viggo can't stand to watch too long.

He closes the curtains before he leaves, the last to go, plunging the living room into murky dimness again, and locks the door behind him. The snow is partly melted, and crushed flat on the road by the tires of Elijah's and Sean's vehicles.

There is a stray cat in his yard when Viggo gets home, and when he calls it, it lets him scratch its ears, so he lets it in and gives it a saucer of milk on the kitchen floor, next to the heating vent. It looks up at him, blinking wide green eyes and purring, before it bends its face and starts making lapping noises. Viggo strokes its side with his bare foot, and he can count its ribs, and feel them vibrating with its purring. It's a little wet--some of its fur stands out in damp spikes, darkening its cream and orange marmalade stripes to a sort of rusty cinnamon color in places. He picks up the phone. He has never forgotten Orli's number, though he has not called it for so long.

"Hello?"

"Orlando," he says, and thinks he should have cleared his throat, and then that he should have said "Orli" after all if there was any way he could have made himself.

"Viggo," he says blankly. There is a pause. "Viggo," Orli repeats, with a tone of pleased surprise starting to filter into his voice.

He doesn't sound angry. It _has_ been a long time. "Yeah," Viggo says. "How are you?"

"Oh, I'm--I--alright. I don't really know," he says a little shakily, "actually."

Viggo smiles and his eyes close. "You should figure it out," he scolds gently.

Orli laughs a little. "Viggo. Wow. Hey--what about you? How are things?"

Viggo picks up the empty saucer and strokes the cat. Something makes him reply, "As well as can be expected."

"Oh?" Orli says softly.

"I think so."

"What have you been working on?" He asks, sounding more certain of himself. His accent comes through.

"Not much," Viggo replies wryly. "Failing to learn batik. I was writing for a while, but I'm not entirely pleased with the result."

"I'm sure you're being too hard on yourself," says Orli.

"I don't think so." He pauses. "And you?"

"Well, I'm in the last week of a shoot." Viggo can't stop himself from wondering about new set romances, but he won't ask that. He's always done everything in the wrong order with Orli. If the right moment presents itself later--if it has a chance to--then maybe he'll ask.

"Really," he says, and Orli proceeds to tell him about the film. He's pretty enthusiastic.

Viggo, who is really interested in the film, asks the appropriate questions and basks in the sound of Orli's voice. He also opens a can of tuna for the cat, writes "cat food" on his shopping list, and puts the kettle on while Orli is talking.

"You'll like it," Orli finishes, not the first time he's said that about it.

"I'll definitely see it," Viggo tells him.

"What are you doing?"

Viggo is looking at the cat. "I just got a cat," he says, because he can't seem to get around to why he called.

Orli exclaims, "You did?"

"Mm-hm. It was in the yard when I got home. It's starving."

"No shit!" He sounds delighted. Then, "Say," he says, "Is it orange?"

"More or less. Let me tell you, it's a very Elvish-looking sort of cat. It would almost have matched your hair."

"My wig," Orli says. "But it's orange?"

Viggo leans down and picks the cat up. It goes limp in his hand, and it doesn't seem to weigh quite five pounds. He thinks it's not all the way adult yet. It drapes over his hand, and settles against his chest, purring, and tries to rub its face on his chin. Viggo laughs. "It's an orange tabby, I think, but it's really a creamy strawberry-blonde color. Or it will be, when it's had a bath."

"Name it Marmalade."

Viggo, startled, laughs again, and Marmalade looks up at him, still purring, and blinks twice. "Orli..."

"Seriously," he interrupts. "I've always wanted to do that. It'd be a good joke."

Viggo shakes his head. "Marmalade it is." He scratches between the cat's ears and it pushes its head against his hand.

"Really?" Orli sounds pleased.

He pets Marmalade absently. "Yeah."

There's a pause, and then Orli clears his throat. "It feels like forever..."

Viggo says, "I know."

"I mean, really, really... fuck, three years."

Viggo doesn't know what to say. He thinks "Sorry" isn't it, but he says that anyway.

He can hear Orli breathing for a second. Then he replies quietly, "So am I."

There's a silence, and a while when they talk about New Year's and Christmas and family, and things like that. The kettle whistles, and Viggo makes a pot of tea. But finally Orli says, "So... what's up?"

And Viggo replies, "Well, I was wondering if you _still_ haven't been on a real road trip."

He laughs quietly. "In Europe!"

"No," Viggo says firmly, "Europe does _not_ count. We've talked about this before."

"Then," says Orli, "I haven't."

Viggo takes a breath. "How do you feel about the beach?"

There's another pause, and Viggo realizes Orli is probably smoking, or just now lighting a cigarette. "You mean going there," Orli says.

Viggo is amused. "Yes."

"I like it," he says cautiously.

_I can't believe I'm doing this,_ Viggo thinks, but he has counted on the fact that once he started this, he wouldn't stop it. "What about," he continues, "a road trip to the beach, with an old man?"

Orli's voice is quieter again, and maybe a bit unsteady, when he answers, "I don't know about that, but I wouldn't mind going with you."

"Good," Viggo says softly, and buries his face in Marmalade's fur. He can smell cat and dirt. It smells warm, if that makes sense. He takes a deep breath and tries to calm down.

"When?" Orli says.

"When can you be here?"


	2. Chattanooga

It's been too long.

There's a second while they're smiling at each other, standing several feet apart at the airport, when Viggo thinks that he's going to cry, and then that he can't bear to touch Orli's beauty after so long, as though it might burn him. He has forgotten. How could he have? There are little crinkles in the corners of his eyes when Orli smiles, and his long, slender arms are covered in a long-sleeved white shirt. A necklace peeps from the collar.

It's hard to believe that it's as hard for Orli as for him, but when he looks into Orli's eyes he sees it, and Viggo has to trust that it is. Then they're hugging, and they stand still in each other's arms, Orli's head lying on Viggo's shoulder, for a long, long time.

He can smell Orli. The moment will stretch out, this silent and unmoving and invulnerable to the hurry of the airport around them, as long as they don't move. Viggo wouldn't notice if someone walked into them, but he can feel the light press of Orli's exquisite long fingers on his back and count the wrinkles in Orli's shirt crushed between their torsos.

Viggo's body knows the exact shape of Orli's and just how they should feel pressed together, and it has not forgotten that in all these years. It's almost painful, the perfection of the moment that could shatter at any time, the present mixing with memory, colored with regret.

He won't go backwards anymore, and he won't say anything until it's right.

Orli smells the way he used to taste, and Viggo keeps breathing more and more of him. The taste tingles on his tongue, and it will have to do for now, because he's not going to kiss Orli--not now, and not here.

The bubble pops and they move apart. Viggo is still warm all over from the feel of Orli. "Don't you have a jacket?" He asks doubtfully. It's February, and there is still lots of snow on the ground outside. His next door neighbor likes to tell him about a snowstorm they had in July when her children were very little. The jacket is in his other bag, which they wait for for a long time in baggage claim. Viggo stands a little way behind Orli, watching the antics of a miniature poodle in a soft-sided pet carrier on some woman's arm: it growls and barks at any movement within a five or ten-foot radius. He also admires the low-riding dirty-looking jeans that outline Orli's shapely ass, and the neat tapering of his sculpted shoulders to narrow hips under the white shirt. As usual, he is not the only one admiring Orli.

"So, when do I get to drive?" Asks Orli cheerfully, on the way to Viggo's house. They're in the middle lane on the Interstate, and a little black sports car zips by going almost forty over the speed limit, and cuts in front of them.

Viggo unclenches his teeth. "You'll drive on the wrong side of the street," he replies.

"I won't!"

He glances at Orli with a smile: he is only pretending to pout. "I don't believe you."

"Come on," he coaxes, "later?"

Viggo snorts. "Maybe after about five years."

"When did you move to Iowa?" Orli says later, when Viggo has almost reached his street.

"A couple of years ago. It just seemed like a good idea." He has answered Orli's next question already, so it takes a second before he comes up with,

"Did a shoot here, huh?" He looks around. All the houses here look small and snug. It's an effect of the rolling hills, the deep snow, and the near-absence of trees.

"Yes," Viggo says, stopping in the driveway.

"When are we going?" Orli asks, looking around the hall. Viggo has walked into the kitchen and turned on the light: it's five, and nearly completely dark already. Marmalade, sitting in a chair pushed half under the table, looks up, purring. Viggo picks him up and turns around.

"Early, I thought." He scratches the point of Marmalade's chin, and deposits him in Orli's arms.

He's not awkward at all, but as graceful as Marmalade as he shifts his arm a little and strokes the large ears, smiling softly down at the cat so something inside Viggo stutters and lurches. "Marmalade, I presume," he murmurs.

Marmalade purrs, and Viggo drapes his jacket over a chair and goes to the refrigerator. "I have some gumbo I thought we'd have--I just made it at lunch."

Orli is sitting in the chair with Viggo's jacket, Marmalade curled up contentedly on his lap, looking out of place and startling in Viggo's kitchen. He smiles a little, looking down at Marmalade still, and it's frighteningly dazzling. "Okay." Then he looks at Viggo solemnly, his mouth soft and serious. "I missed you."

Viggo smiles and nods and makes himself say "I missed you too," only a hundredth of what it was like and what he wants to say. There is time for all that. Orli is here, and what will happen will.

* * *

He will not know why he wakes up. It will be still and silent and almost pitch-black, the room empty.

He will pad silently into the living room. Light will be pouring from the kitchen, fluorescent white, a cooler closed on the table and a messy jumble next to it of keys, slips of paper, a wallet, a bottle of pills, all the chaos of a trip not yet fully prepared for. Marmalade will twine around his ankles with a soft cry, but Viggo will not stop.

The couch, when he pauses beside it, will be empty, the afghan over the arm neatly folded, a faint wrinkle in a throw pillow at the other end of it. He will look fixedly at the empty couch as if he can conjure Orli's sleeping form there if he concentrates hard enough.

It will not work.

Finally he will go to the window and stand looking out at the trees in the backyard. He will be able to sense the heat of the night through the glass, and the faint creaking of cricket song will come through. When he presses his palm to the glass, it will feel nearly the same temperature as his skin. Viggo will think of bed--he needs sleep--nothing can make him more withdrawn than discomfort combined with fatigue. If he's tired in the car tomorrow, he'll be miserable. There's no way to be comfortable in a Jeep, even if you can sleep. It will make him groggy, and he will be thoughtful and quiet. Orli will probably be irritated.

He will look in the refrigerator, drain the rest of a carton of milk and throw it away, and start to restore some order to the mess on the table, but he will lose his concentration partway through without realizing it. He will come to himself staring at the corner torn off of a yellow legal pad, the address of a specialty bookstore in his own handwriting, rather messy in bleeding blue felt-tip pen. Viggo will shake his head and throw away the slip of paper, and turn off the kitchen light when he leaves.

A glance into his darkened office as he moves back towards the bedroom will make him pause, his eye perhaps caught by some trick of shadow. He'll take a few steps inside the door, and then he'll be able to distinguish, in the darkness, Orli's hands in his lap, his head tipped back against the back of the desk chair. Orli will be asleep, turned most of the way away from him, ghostly in the blackness. Viggo will watch for a moment.

He will look comfortable.

Viggo will leave him there.

In the morning they will leave later than they intended to, silent and purposeful in their hurry, not speaking. Orli's silences, he will know, can be contemplative, but they are more often a sign that he's angry or unhappy, or both, and, like now, is restraining himself from reckless speech. Sometimes Orli can be moody, and Viggo will be able to read him well enough to know how he feels, but not to tell what is wrong. Orli will pause in the driveway to put on his sunglasses, and look, despite his coldness, as young and beautiful and gloriously human as at the start of a long-past road trip that will live constantly in Viggo's memory.

* * *

It's Orli who remembers the cat. "What about Marmalade?" He asks the next morning.

Viggo has only had a cat for a few weeks. He has plenty of cat food, but he hasn't thought about it. "Dammit," he sighs.

"You could just let him go outside again," Orli says doubtfully. It's clear he doesn't really like this plan, and as cold as it is, and as small as Marmalade is, Viggo sympathizes.

"He did survive on his own before..." Viggo says, just before Marmalade leaps nimbly onto the kitchen table to rub his head affectionately on Viggo's hand.

"Mrow," he announces, not as if he wants anything, but just making conversation. Orli looks stricken.

"I suppose," Viggo says, having third and fourth thoughts before he can even finish saying it, "We could take him with us."

Marmalade goes in the back seat of the Jeep, along with a cooler and some bags of things. "Too bad we can't put the top down," Orli says regretfully as he opens the passenger door, but he's smiling slightly anyway, like he has been ever since he walked into the kitchen and accepted a cup of coffee, still rubbing sleep from his eyes.

Viggo puts the Jeep in reverse. "Trust me, you'd get tired of it very quickly. Also--it's cold."

Orli shrugs. "I'm used to it. --So. Where exactly are we going?"

"Florida."

Orli whistles. "How long will that take?"

Viggo says, "It depends. Probably a few days."

"Wow." Orli shakes his head. "You could drive across all of France in that time."

Viggo's lips twitch, and he says, "That's why it's not a real road trip."

"Whatever," says Orli, smiling too.

After a suitable period of exploring the back seat, Marmalade discovers a preference for being as close as possible to them. He climbs between the two front seats and tries to crawl into Viggo's lap.

"No," Viggo says, sharply, although he knows there's no chance of the cat knowing what he's talking about, let alone obeying. Marmalade, oblivious, puts his front paws on Viggo's thigh and leans across him to sniff the door, tail waving happily in the air. He isn't in the way yet, but he is making Viggo nervous. When he crawls the rest of the way into Viggo's lap, that's the final straw. Viggo tries to shoo him away with one hand while Orli laughs.

Finally, when Marmalade (who reacts to any hand near his head by rubbing his cheekbones on it) has started purring loudly and kneading Viggo's thigh with his claws, Orli intervenes at Viggo's loud, startled yelp. The Jeep only swerves slightly. "Whoa," Orli grins, not seeming in the least perturbed, and reaches for the cat. "Come here, then." His fingers, curling around Marmalade's ribs, brush Viggo's thigh. Viggo glances at him as he deposits the cat on his lap, where it promptly curls itself into a sleek furry ball, all the while rumbling enthusiastically.

The hum of the heater and Marmalade's throaty noises of pleasure are the only sound for a little while. Out of the corner of his eye, Viggo can see Orli's hand spread over the cat's shoulderblades, occasionally stirring to pet him gently, scratching behind his ears.

"You know," Orli muses, "I think he's purring louder for me."

So would Viggo. What he says is, "It's possible."

Fields give way to low hills give way to tiny patches of towns give way to fields again. There are some cows and horses, but mostly there are just the flat spreads of snow and the round humps of the hills under it, and the white-iced trees. Orli is quiet, looking out the window dreamily, but when Viggo asks he is willing to talk about the movie he just finished.

"A lot of those artsy New York people," he says vaguely. "Drama school."

"Whereas you're an artsy London person?" Viggo asks.

"I'm not a London person," Orli laughs.

"All artsy English people are London people," maintains Viggo, who has usually been _too_ artsy to be called artsy. He gets "eccentric" a lot.

This annoys Orli even though he can tell that Viggo is just teasing him. "And all Yanks are New York or L.A. or..."

"Or?"

Orli has stopped petting him, and Marmalade makes a soft mewl of protest, nudging hard at Orli's hand, then again when he ignores the first move. "Or country bumpkins," says Orli mischievously.

"So that's what I am," Viggo concludes. "Not a rugged woodsman? Not..."

"Nope," Orli interrupts. "Just ask one of my co-stars."

"If I have the chance, I'll keep it in mind," says Viggo.

Orli sleeps for a little more than an hour in the early afternoon. His head is to the side, his lips slightly parted, his hand lying loose on his knee. Viggo wants to reach out and touch him; he wants to have the right to do it, to lace their fingers on Orli's knee, and kiss Orli's knuckles if he wakes up. He doesn't have the right, and he doesn't do it.

He waits for Orli to wake up.

* * *

It will be one of those glaring days when even sunglasses and the tint of the windshield can't prevent their eyes from hurting as they look out the window. Orli will be squinting behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses for most of the morning, while the airconditioner begins working far too slowly, and then, as usual, works too well. Soon it will be too cold, but Orli will not touch the controls. Finally Viggo will turn it down a few notches, getting a quick glance from Orli, but no response.

It will still be a little chilled. They will stop midmorning at one of those large gas stations that sell everything from showers (by the quarter) to blankets to music to food, because there's no other place to buy things for an hour in any direction. When Viggo climbs down, pushing his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose, he'll walk into the summer again like a thick, wet blanket of dense heat. He'll wade through it to the store, and the bathroom, where the air, much colder than in the Jeep, will go to work at once trying to raise goosebumps on his arms.

Orli will pay for the gas, and when he climbs into the car after Viggo, he will thrust a styrofoam cup into Viggo's hands. Viggo will sniff it, take an exploratory sip that scorches the tip of his tongue almost too hard to tell the flavor. Hazelnut coffee, strong. Orli will pull straight through, stop only perfunctorily at the exit, and turn smoothly back onto the little spur of entrance/exit ramp. Viggo will take another painful sip of hazelnut, and it will burn down his throat. He will turn his head, watching Orli concentrate as he speeds up and merges back into the right lane, then the center, passing two RVs, a Volkswagen, and a a Suburban. The shadows of speed limit signs and clouds will slide up Orli's nose and show reflected in the lenses of his sunglasses. Viggo will smile at him, for a long time, until Orli turns his head at last, an inquiring look on his face.

He won't unbend enough to smile back, just seem to carefully observe Viggo's expression before turning back to the road. Viggo will blow across the opening in the lid of the cup and watch a curl of steam vanish, breathe deeply, and take another little sip of his coffee.

* * *

The fact that the ground is covered with snow that hasn't yet melted should show that it is too cold to rain: it should just snow again, brittle dusty flurries of white swirling on the street under their tires and against the windshield, because if it's wet snow, it will turn slushy and the roads could freeze. Already this morning Viggo has inched very slowly over a bridge on the far side of his lane, next to a semi.

The sun is high, the sky only thinly overcast, cottony white all over, and the snow hasn't melted yet, but it starts to look like rain for a while before it rains. Orli has drawn his feet up to rest on the edge of the seat, his legs folded and his knees on the dash. Marmalade, miffed when he can't convince Orli to arrange himself more to his liking, retreats to the back seat.

"It looks like rain," Orli says, looking wide-eyed out the window.

"I hope it snows instead," Viggo sighs. Slush is bad, but ice is terrible.

It doesn't snow instead. The first drops fall far apart, spraying little stars of droplets on the windshield and staining the pavement black in front of them. They race towards a dusky horizon, muddy purple with thickening clouds. The cars crawling up the hill towards them on the other half of the interstate all have their lights on now in the lowering gloom, and it's a long string of little white jewels like Christmas lights in the snow.

Rhythmic pattering turns to a quick, nervous drumming on the roof of the Jeep. Rain falls faster, slicking the windshield in crooked sloughs in between swipes of the windshield wiper blades. It's like staring alternately through a clear windowpane, and a slab of thick, wavy antique glass. The whole Interstate has slowed; even little sports cars pass them more slowly, only going eighty and eighty-five now.

It slows more, until, staring through a shifting silver curtain of rain, they can't tell precisely where the cars are moving faster and where they're at a standstill from one moment to the next. They're inching along. Viggo drums his fingers on the steering wheel, but Orli, who is looking out the window at a gray-green landscape running together like a watercolor dipped in bathwater, says softly, "Isn't it pretty?"

The ground slopes away from the gravel edges, rather steeply but not too far to be extremely dangerous. It rises again more gradually, smattered with bare black trees and a few evergreens. They have come further south: most of the snow was probably melted even before the rain started, but the rain took care of the rest of it. There's only the occasional spot of white on the ground. Rainwater streams down from the verge into the ditch and pours down a slight incline, vanishing behind them with swirls carrying twigs and dead grass stems.

"It's nice," Viggo agrees. "But it can be frustrating to drive in."

Now the noise of the storm is just a constant rushing that blends with the sound of the heater. The sky is as near to black as makes no difference, and in the distance they can see sheet lightning. "Maybe we should turn the heater back up," Orli suggests, and they do.

Few minutes pass before the lightning has moved close enough for them to hear the first clap of thunder. A flash illuminates the interior of the car, throwing Orli's face into high relief, his eyes darting to Viggo and his mouth open, slightly startled, at the sound. Marmalade slinks back up to the front seat and lies on Orli's lap again close to his body, and hides his head between Orli's arm and his stomach.

Viggo laughs and reaches over to stroke Marmalade's back soothingly. It's starting to warm up again and his hand skims fur that's soft to the touch, heated with the cat's body heat and Orli's proximity. The back of his hand touches Orli's shirt when he's not looking.

"Doesn't the sound of rain make you feel like a little kid again?" Orli asks him. They haven't moved for almost five minutes. Viggo turns to look at him.

"Does it make you?"

"Oh, yeah. I loved rain when I was a kid. --And being in a little place like this car in the rain, all warm--it's so safe. It feels twice as warm and comfortable as it did before. I don't know; maybe it's the sound."

"Mm." Viggo tilts his head a little and smiles at Orli. "I see what you mean. It is nice, now." The whole world is dark fluid, practically, spread out in a circle with them at the center, entirely lit with red and white lights. Moving water captures the light and twists it into stars and beams and snaky lines on the side windows. "It doesn't remind me of when I was a child, so much--but it reminds me of lots of other things. Camping in the rain--it's funny, but even though you hate it at first, you love to remember it. And going outside in the rain in the summer. Swimming in the rain." Another flash. "Although," he adds thoughtfully, "not in a thunderstorm."

"Yeah," Orli says wistfully. "If it weren't so damned cold, I'd get out and open my mouth and drink the rain. After all, no one on the whole bloody road is moving."

Viggo laughs. Marmalade gets up and turns around three times before tucking himself into an even smaller, tighter ball, with his nose underneath one paw and the tip of his tail. Orli retrieves his jacket from the back seat and spreads it over him, smiling slightly.

They pass two exits and a variety of unreadable blue and green signs, and Speed Limit 75 signs that are rather ironic in the circumstances. Viggo puts the Jeep in park long enough to lean into the back seat and get a bag of pretzels, so that Orli won't have to disturb Marmalade, and they snack on them for a while. It's only a little after four, which is too early to eat, he's determined.

Traffic congestion eases only unevenly, so that first one lane, then the other is moving, and for a long time they play leap-frog with the cars in the middle lane. When both lanes are moving, the road is like a mirror, it's so wet, except where the shallower ditches are filled and water flows right across the road in winding black streams. The pace is faster, but Viggo is less easy, not more, because he can hardly see where he's going and people are using their brakes erratically. Three accidents, one blocking a whole lane of traffic, one in the median and one on the verge, convince him that he doesn't want to be driving in this thunderstorm after all, and he takes the next reasonable exit even though it's still too early to eat and, he hopes, too early to stop.

"We're not getting out, are we," Orli says, looking around and hugging his arms when Viggo parks in a parking lot.

Viggo unsnaps his seatbelt and stretches. "I guess not." He doesn't want to walk through the rain anyway. He can't see individual raindrops or even _sheets_ of rain; it's like being underwater, unbelievably wet. The shopping center they're parked at is brown brick, black windows, and smudges of awning appearing and vanishing. It's easier to just watch the rain than to try to see through it.

Orli sleeps again, leaning back against the door, one hand resting on Marmalade's back. He has told Viggo that the sound of the rain is making him sleepy, and Viggo can't blame him. Even through the booms and claps of thunder, it's soothing, and he's right, the Jeep feels snug and warm and just the right size. The parking lot is nearly invisible. They could be anywhere, even in Middle-Earth. It is easy to imagine, looking at Orli, that some kind of magic as at work. His eyelashes are a black shock on his cheekbones. Viggo already knows that they flutter in his sleep when he's dreaming.

He falls asleep watching Orli, and wakes up, arching his back and stretching, to find Orli, his position slightly shifted, watching him through eyes that are only mostly-open. "What time is it?" Viggo asks.

"You left the car running," Orli points out. "It's five thirty."

Viggo considers. The rain hasn't stopped, but it has slackened some. He can see the parking lot. "Are you hungry?"

There doesn't seem to be anything to do but eat. They get Chinese from one of those little diner-like places with moveable-letter menus, big painted windows, and metal-frame chairs with plastic cushions pushed under small square tables, because it's in the shopping center, and they don't have to move the car. They walk mostly under awnings and get very damp, but not wet, except for what drips from their hair to the backs of their necks. The fried rice is very good, and they save some pieces of pork to give Marmalade in the car. Orli is a connoisseur of wontons, and refuses to finish his soup, so Viggo does, and Orli eats sweet and sour chicken instead.

"Wait." Orli seizes his hand as Viggo is about to step down from the curb and unlock the Jeep.

"What?" When he turns, Orli is standing close behind him, and he pulls him closer until they're standing shoulder to shoulder. He is looking into Viggo's eyes, Viggo thinks, but he can't tell what he is looking for.

He thinks Orli is going to kiss him. It would be out of order--but it would be Orli, not him, and God, he wants it now, Orli standing so close, a sheen of damp on his cheeks.

Instead, Orli points out at the dull sky. There are cracks in the cloud cover, back the way they came, as if the sky had been made out of old leather that's coming apart, and the cracks glow with red and violet sunset. The cracks make a fine web near the Western horizon, and they stop fairly soon, before the whole sky gets dark again. But light lances from them into the air, making real sunbeams that are visible, almost palpable, like prisms in the sky that would burn your fingertips if you stretched out your hand.

Viggo looks at it silently for a long time. "It's beautiful," he finally says. They step off the curb. The shadow of the awning slips up like a veil rising from over Orli's face, and the little remaining light kisses his eyelids as gently as Viggo might have.

* * *

There won't be anything either of them wants to listen to on the radio. Viggo will rifle through Orli's CDs, between the two front seats, and find some Beatles. Orli will smile a little when he hears the CD come on. He will skip three tracks, though, and finally turn it off in the middle of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."

He'll say "Sorry" when Viggo looks curiously at him, and shrug.

There will be a dead deer in the road somewhere in northern Illinois. Orli will make a disgusted sound and switch far too quickly into the other lane, barely glancing over his shoulder. He will have had plenty of room, but the minivan behind will honk anyway. "Fuck you," he'll mutter, startling in the pervasive silence.

Later, they will stop at a rest area with pictures of Illinois on the trashcans. There will be a map holder next to the doors inside, but it will be empty. Viggo will drink water from the water fountain; it will splash up in his face and make the burns in his mouth tingle. He will walk back out, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. There will be two dogs nearby, one playing frisbee on the lawn with some little boys, one small and fluffy, locked up in a car with the windows down. It will stick its nose out as he walks past on the sidewalk, sniffing, and yap sharply.

Orli will be leaning against the hood with his sunglasses on, cracking his knuckles. When Viggo stops in front of him, he'll look up so that their eyes would have met if he wasn't wearing sunglasses. Viggo will stare into his sunglasses and wish he could read his mind, but he won't say anything then either. Orli's lips will tighten and he'll look off to the side. Then he'll pull the keys out of his pocket and drop them into Viggo's palm, and fold Viggo's hand around them.

"I wonder how he is," Orli will say very suddenly, when they haven't even driven past two exits after the rest area. He will be talking about Elijah, of course.

"He'll live," Viggo will sigh, thinking that that is probably the best that can be said. It's not possible to think positive things about the end of a friend's marriage no matter how many negative things you thought about it before. If it is, it's not possible to talk about them.

Orli will murmur after a minute, "Maybe it's for the best," and that will be the closest they come to saying what they have both thought about it.

Viggo will have been in the habit of being impressed with Elijah's maturity and wisdom, before he got married. He will suppose there is only so far those can go for anyone. More than anything, he will feel sorry for Elijah. "Yes," he will say, and that will be the closest they come to discussing it then.

"The kinds of problems he had..." Orli will pause. "He couldn't have fixed it."

"It could have been a lot messier." _Even_ messier, Viggo will think: that's what he should have said.

Orli won't say anything else about the things they have both always known and the other things that they have both always suspected. They will never have discussed them except in the most oblique way, in the shortest conversations in the middle of the night. Only, "I hope he's alright."

* * *

A little before eight, Orli becomes convinced he can't live any longer without french fries. As this coincides with a McDonald's billboard, Viggo takes the exit, grinning. "You didn't say anything about this at dinner," he teases.

Orli retorts with dignity, "I hadn't thought of it at dinner."

"You haven't convinced me," Viggo says, and drives past it.

"Hey!" Exclaims an outraged Orli, lunging across to touch the steering wheel and pretend to turn it. Marmalade is spilled unceremoniously onto the seat next to Orli's left thigh, and blinks sleepily, lifting his head.

"I think I'll just turn around up here, and go back to the Interstate," says Viggo, getting in a turn lane that leads to a gas station.

"You're awfully high-handed, even for a King," Orli complains. "I'm sure Queen Elizabeth is much more obliging than this."

"She hasn't defeated the forces of the Dark Lord. She doesn't have the right to be high-handed."

"Neither have you," says Orli. "That was Lij."

"Anyway," Viggo continues, "I'm sure Queen Elizabeth _wouldn't_ stop less than three hours after dinner to get french fries when she'd already been considerably delayed."

"She would, so. She would take it with equanimity."

Viggo pulls into the gas station parking lot and drives in a neat arc to the exit a few hundred feet further along. "You Elves don't want to be ruining your complexions with greasy food."

"_Nothing_ could ruin my complexion," says Orli.

Viggo laughs hard enough to make it an effort to see well enough to merge back into traffic. He stays in the right lane, and a few seconds later, he pulls into the McDonald's parking lot.

"You were always going to," Orli accuses, but Viggo just smiles and unlocks the doors.

Orli can consume a lot of french fries. Viggo drinks a milkshake and snatches a few handfuls of salt and oil, just to make his evening completely unhealthy. Orli eats two cardboard cartons of the things. The thought of that many of them makes Viggo faintly ill.

"I've never met a cat as friendly as Marmalade before," Orli says, partway through the second carton.

"Me either," Viggo says. "I wouldn't have been stuck with him otherwise. I called him, and instead of just letting me pet him and then leaving again, he was just as... utterly charming as he knew how to be. The next thing I knew, I was giving him my last can of tuna."

Rather like Orli, actually, but he doesn't say this.

And--maybe this is unfair to the cat, but--he doesn't have any evidence that Orli did it on purpose.

Orli is talking about Marmalade's antics and his nighttime curtain-chasing habits, but Viggo finds himself having to force his eyes open. Orli frowns. "Maybe we'd better stop."

He is defeated. They've lost time today already, but he supposes a fixed schedule is not in the spirit of "real" road trips either.

There are two beds in the hotel room. Viggo goes first down the hall so he won't have to watch Orli's walk. The thought of "bed" seems to have banished some of his fatigue. He sits down in the chair and pushes it back against the wall, resting his arm on the desk, while Orli goes in the bathroom. He can hear running water, and he studiously thinks about how much time they have lost and when they will probably leave tomorrow rather than about Orli in the shower.

He wakes up in the middle of the night with one of the blankets on top of him, still in the chair. Evidently he was tired after all. The rumble of the heater is loud. Marmalade, he sees, is lying at the foot of the bed Orli occupies in a tangle of white sheet with the coverlet half-kicked off. Viggo's keys are on the corner of the desk--Orli must have smuggled him in after Viggo was asleep. He thinks about staying in the chair, which is not too uncomfortable.

He thinks about walking quietly across the room and getting into bed with Orli, curling close around him and kissing the golden skin of his collarbone he can see peeping over the top of the blanket. Viggo can feel the ghost of Orli's weight on him. He knows what it's like to wake up in a warm tangle of Orli, sometimes with a leg or an arm at a funny angle, but never with any will to care as long as Orli's head is tucked in the crook of his neck, his slim muscle-corded arm wrapped around Viggo's waist, his mouth open somewhere on Viggo's body. He liked to wake up and watch Orli sleep. He liked to wake up slowly with Orli's lips moving on his.

Viggo has stood up and is hardly aware of moving, but he's standing, the blanket draped over his arm, still dressed, by the side of Orli's bed. Orli's face is turned, pressed into the pillow, his arm lying stretched around the pillow, over his head.

He turns and sheds his clothes, down to boxers, before climbing between the cold sheets of the other bed and spreading the warm blanket over it all. Marmalade lifts his head, seems to consider moving, but quickly goes back to sleep with Orli.

Marmalade has only slept on his feet twice in almost a month. He is not surprised. Viggo falls asleep watching Orli's face. His mouth open, his cheeks faintly flushed, his hair short and bristly, there is no trace of Legolas. His beauty is entirely his own.

* * *

Viggo won't be able to stop himself from worrying about Elijah, who will have sounded very, very tired on the phone, and he will try to lose himself in driving. It will help, but not much. He will think, not really resentfully, that it is just like Orli to bring something like this up--a thorny issue that won't leave him alone, now, and can't be resolved, and might have some bearing on Viggo that he will shy away from thinking about at all.

He'll be glad Orli is there, next to him, even brooding and sleeping and possibly (Viggo will uncharitably suspect) sulking.

He will blink to see a confederate flag bumper sticker, and then see that the car has a Kentucky plate. Looking around will quickly show him a number of them, and it will be confirmed at the next sign for a state highway. Viggo will be somewhat shaken to not have noticed the "Welcome to Kentucky" signs, and will resolve to pay more attention to the road.

The problem will be that paying close attention to the road, on the Interstate, is hypnotic. It will stretch ahead and behind, essentially straight and generally level, an unbroken black ribbon. They're going fast, but their speed barely varies. Sometimes Viggo will follow one car for an hour or more, and then pass just to break the monotony and lower the danger of falling asleep. Of course, the Interstate boring is better than the Interstate interesting, as when he will enter a long, dense string of semis and be forced to weave in and out among them, trying to pass. Some of them will be, of all things, attempting to pass each _other_, even on hills and curves. There will be many more trees in Kentucky; Viggo will find himself wishing for the broad flat emptiness of Iowa.

He will try to compose poetry mentally. He will lose the thread of his thought again and again. "Orli, will you turn on the radio?" He'll ask, becoming desperate.

Orli will give him a funny look, but turn it on and start flipping through the stations. "What do you want?"

"Something to keep me awake."

Orli will smile grimly and change the station away from country. "I got that. I meant, what kind of music or--"

"I know what you meant," Viggo will interrupt. "And I meant that I just want something to keep myself awake. I'd appreciate it if you would choose a station." He will already be regretting having interrupted when Orli says,

"Since I didn't want to listen to the radio and have no preference, then, I'll leave it here." _Here_ will appear to be the kind of Christian talk show that is confined to AM stations for the most part, in Iowa. Viggo will not say anything, even though the reception will be poor. He will think that maybe it's just as well he can't tell exactly what they're saying. That way it will be entertaining for longer before it starts to drive him insane.

At any rate, Orli will not be able to stand it for very long before he switches to classic rock. "Thank you," Viggo will say.

Orli will reach out and turn the volume nearly all the way up, so that speech would be impossible. Viggo will not have much of anything to say, anyway, and it will not be quite loud enough to hurt his ears, but he'll be more bothered by the sentiment.

When "Tainted Love" comes on, in a very strange metal cover, he will switch the station.

"I like that song," Orli will announce distantly, after they have listened to nearly thirty seconds of what seems to be Enya.

"Tainted Love?" Viggo will ask. No answer. "I like the original," he will say. Again, silence, but he'll be aware that it's possible Orli couldn't hear him.

* * *

They would reach Chattanooga early in the morning, but early in the morning, neither of them is even awake. Viggo wakes up at least once in full daylight and drifts back to sleep without even opening his eyes all the way, which is very unusual for him. When he finally does get up, he loses the end of a very pleasant dream before he can catch it, as he sits up.

The odds are it was about Orli, but he can't even remember that for certain. When he turns his head, Orli is lying on his back, his head turned to the side. Deep brown eyes are fixed on Viggo, preternaturally alert as Orli sometimes is when he's just woken up. "I slept late," he says at once, and his voice is thick and sweet with sleep. Viggo smiles, unable to stop himself when confronted with that tone and those eyes.

"You're not alone." Oops. Double entendres no longer only mental.

Orli smiles, either because Viggo smiled or because he's awake enough to catch sexual innuendo even when he's actually asleep. "It's ten," Orli says, and Viggo winces.

"I was afraid of that," he mutters, and slides out of bed. He stands up, a little chilled out of the covers despite the heating, and stretches. He imagines that he can feel Orli's eyes on his naked back.

Viggo goes to take a shower. He can't keep shower-thoughts away when the water is really streaming over him, recalling to mind yesterday's rain and Orli's talk of childhood, and standing outside in the rain drinking it. Viggo has seen him do that before, in New Zealand. Then he was so wet his eyelashes stuck together and his shirt was plastered to his shoulders, and Viggo caught him from behind and pulled him close, the whole lengths of their torsos burning together through two layers of cold clammy shirt. When they kissed, it was more like drinking the rain from Orli's lips. His mouth was cold at first against Viggo's, but it curved into a smile and warmed quickly.

They only fucked a few times in showers, considering how many opportunities they would have had. It's not generally in Viggo's nature to be so impatient as to make love pressed up against any wall--especially not a wet and potentially slippery one.

But it was hot. He'll never forget the difference between the hot wet of the shower water and the hot wet of Orli's mouth, the rough caress of his tongue on Viggo's nipples. He tilts his head back and lets the water run over his face and into his mouth as he slowly wraps his hand around his straining erection and begins to stroke it in a deliberate rhythm. Standing in a shower, with Orli in the next room, isn't a time for decadent pleasure, or careful enjoyment; Viggo intends to be efficient, and to meet Orli's eyes without looking away when he steps out of the bathroom. He needs this, though. His body thinks he needs Orli, but he cheats it with the memory of Orli's tongue, the hot water cascading down his body, and the friction of skin on skin.

He leans against the wall when he comes, then washes off carefully. When he comes out of the bathroom, dressed but barefoot, with his hair curling damp against the back of his neck, Marmalade twines around his feet with a soft cry. Orli is sitting in the desk chair, putting on his shoes. He looks up and smiles into Viggo's eyes, warm and secretive, a look that Viggo remembers from long ago--almost.

It is different, now, newer, not deliberately suggestive. Viggo feels his heart lifting when he smiles back. Orli puts their bags and the cat in the back seat of the Jeep, and they go together to get cheap black coffee with paper packets of sugar to take with them. Orli wears sunglasses, khaki slacks, Italian loafers and a gray sweatshirt with the same air with which he wore leggings and a jerkin, leather gauntlets and a silk shirt. Viggo has to push Marmalade out of the driver's seat when they climb in the car, and Orli scoops him up, laughing, and lifts him to nuzzle their noses together and bury his face in the soft creamy fur on his neck.

"You smell good," he tells the cat, and Viggo's stomach clenches tight. He pulls out of the parking space with only a cursory glance over his shoulder and speeds back towards the Interstate. They go through the McDonald's drive through, as it is the fastest, and the only place directly on their route. "What scent is that?" Orli playfully asks Marmalade, when they're stopped at the first window. "What's that? ...You're being very close-mouthed about this whole thing. It's a simple enough question. ...What's the matter, afraid I'm going to copy your style?"

Viggo rolls his eyes, and the teenager leaning out the window with his change gives him a funny look. When he turns back to Orli, they're both grinning.

He gingerly eats a sausage biscuit with one hand, the other on the steering wheel, and the Jeep on cruise control, while Orli happily munches on a hashbrown, the morning equivalent of french fries. "That was pretty horrible traffic yesterday," Orli observes in a minute, licking oil from his lips. "Do you suppose it was only the rain?"

"Maybe only mostly the rain," Viggo says. "There might have been something going on around there, though."

Orli shakes his head. "Well, it was ridiculous." He feeds a crumb of egg to Marmalade, who sniffs it daintily before taking it from him, and then proceeds to very thoroughly lick his hand.

"Just wait for Chattanooga," Viggo tells him.

"Chattanooga? Why?" His voice is rough with bemused laughter as he watches Marmalade lick his thumb.

"You'll see."

By the time they're within half an hour of Chattanooga, Orli has been watching Viggo for some time. He can feel Orli's eyes on him, but it doesn't bother him. He glances sideways and their gazes meet, matter-of-fact.

"If you're going to have to go to the bathroom at all in the next two hours or so," Viggo tells him, "It will have to be at one of the next couple of exits."

Orli shrugs. "Probably not," he says, scratching Marmalade's chin and looking down for the first time in probably ten or twenty minutes. "But might as well stop." Viggo gets gas and uses the bathroom, and Orli buys a neon green beverage with a lot of caffeine in it. "Fortification," he grins. "Before the Two Hours of Darkness."

Viggo opens the door and easily catches Marmalade by the scruff of the neck before he can jump out. "Sort of the Mines of Moria of the Quest for Miami," he agrees.

"The Fellowship of the Cat?" Says Orli, opening the bottle with a suspicious fizzing hiss.

"Marmalade the pony." Viggo heads back towards the Interstate. "It's more like the Fellowship of Orli."

Orli laughs, "Then it only has one member."

Viggo says challengingly, "What? You think I can't handle it?"

"Fine. You're a one-man fellowship, and I'm the precious, dangerous cargo you're carrying to Miami to cast into the depths of the ocean."

Viggo smiles, "Something like that." He thinks about making a joke about "my precious," but he decides it would cut too close.

The traffic gradually thickens and slows, and soon enough, they're nearly at a standstill, in the right lane. One lane is always closed at Chattanooga, but he can never remember (or guess) which one. It does no good to be in the right one, anyway. Right now the other lane is inching by them, but that will change. "Chattanooga?" Says Orli, with an appraising glance at the other lane.

"Yes," Viggo sighs. "Speak, friend, and enter at your own risk."

Orli has turned to look at him again, and when Viggo glances inquiringly at him there is a warm, private smile on his face again. "Friend," he says deliberately, and Viggo smiles back.

There is a little silence. The other lane has stopped, and in a few seconds the red brake lights flicker and the car in front of them rolls forward; Viggo passes the same red pickup, white Cadillac, blue station wagon, black SUV, and silver Saturn that just passed him. "Fascinating," Orli says dryly. "We never move the same distance or for the same amount of time, yet neither lane seems to be making any more progress than the other."

"Physics of traffic jams," Viggo says, and is rewarded with one of Orli's laughs. Later, he asks if there is a route that doesn't go through Chattanooga. "I could find one," Viggo tells him, "but I sort of like it, actually."

Orli looks at him thoughtfully, then out the window again. They're stopped, and so is the other lane. A pudgy-faced blonde girl, about ten or twelve, is staring out the back window of the blue station wagon at them, nose pressed to the glass. As Viggo watches Orli watch, she crosses her eyes and sticks out her tongue, and Orli laughs, delighted, and crosses his eyes back at her. Viggo shakes his head, but he can't help laughing too.

A frazzled-looking gray-haired woman is driving the Cadillac behind the station wagon. They can't see her anymore from here, but she had the window rolled down, smoking a cigarette and tapping the ash against the door so it fell into the street. She was wearing sunglasses the last time they drove past her, but she tipped them up to stare at Orli, and then slowly smiled before putting them back on.

This is why Viggo likes Chattanooga.

They pull forward again, out of view of the station wagon, and Orli sighs and leans his head against the seat back. "I see the attraction here," he says. "Rather like going to a mall just before Christmas. You can't go anywhere and you don't know anyone, yet you can't feel alone because you're just surrounded with millions of people."

"In Chattanooga, you don't have to walk," Viggo says.

"Mmm," Orli agrees, "you're with all these other people that you'll never see again that you don't know at all, and it's so strange... I almost felt close to that little girl there. And yet at the same time you're perfectly safe, isolated in your own car. It's comfortable," he says softly, looking at Viggo again. "Our own little world."

Viggo's eyes are drawn irresistably to Orli. He's smiling a little and his eyes are very deep and dark. "Our own little world," he is saying back, smiling too, before he has had time to think anything at all.

"Sort of like the rain," Orli murmurs, and goes back to petting Marmalade.

Clouds cover the sun and then flee again, and the air is pale, not white but almost transparent. It is unmistakeably winter, even though there is no snow in Chattanooga. The blue station wagon catches them up again, and the girl and Orli play a game of hide and seek. She crouches down below the level of the window, rising again with a grin on her face, several times before they're out of sight.

"I wonder what she'd do," Viggo remarks, "If you rolled down the window and reached out the next time we drove by."

Orli looks intrigued. "Probably roll hers down too and reach out to try to catch my hand!" His hand is on the window control, and Viggo, alarmed, tells him hastily that he was kidding. Orli pretends to pout, but then he says: "So was I."

The girl has a pair of sunglasses the next time they come even, and does a pretty good imitation of Orli.

The next time, she is blowing bubbles with gum. They seem in constant danger of popping on the window.

At first when he says it Viggo thinks he has misheard. His head turns sharply and he says cautiously, "What?"

Orli is still looking out the window, petting Marmalade on his lap. "I said I thought about you all the time. But really I should say I _think_ of you all the time. Because I still do. It's probably stupid of me to say so and everything. You invited me out here, though, and it really just... it's not that I don't like being alone with you, Viggo, but it might have been a better idea not to have come."

Viggo says softly, "Orli." This is earlier than he meant--he'd been going to wait for the beach, and they were going to talk about it there, when they'd have all the time in the world. Maybe Orli was wise to pick now, though, because it's one of the qualities of these Chattanooga traffic jams that even if they don't take all the time in the world, they seem to.

"We could never do anything right," Orli says tiredly. His hand pauses on Marmalade's shoulderblades, and he stares at it for a moment before he looks up penetratingly at Viggo. "I'm not a child. That stuff about the rain yesterday...? I remember when I was a little kid, yes. Sometimes I even act like one. But I'm not."

"I know," Viggo says. _"Orli."_

"What?"

Once again it is backwards. Orli wasn't supposed to speak first. Wasn't it Viggo's fault? But he could almost smile anyway, because he didn't expect that much from Orli. Perhaps he shouldn't have come. But he did. "I've been thinking about the past. About--us. In New Zealand. And I think you're right, that we did a lot of things wrong. I made a lot of mistakes." Orli's hand isn't still anymore; it's trembling. "I think it might even have been a mistake that first night when I kissed you in the hotel..."

Orli's hand has tensed so abruptly that Marmalade yelps and slides away from him to vanish into the back seat, and he's left to twist his fingers together in his lap. "Then why...?" He says tightly.

"Why? Why did I kiss you?" Viggo laughs. "Well, I don't know about you. I could hardly help it--you were making me crazy," he remembers, "so young and brilliant, and half the time you were innocent, but then you were as wicked as a devil, and mischievous like a little boy. And you were so beautiful... your smile. I couldn't stop thinking--your mouth. Your lips. I thought I was just going to kiss you once. I thought you might let me kiss you, once. I didn't think anything would happen."

Orli breathes shakily. "I did," he says in a low voice. "But only once."

"But this is what I wanted to say," Viggo continues, after he has finished absorbing that, staring with his eyes narrowed at Orli's averted profile. "I wanted to say that we always did everything out of order. And I regret that. I think you may have been wondering--especially last night, I think--" Orli ducks his head "--what I was going to do, what I was thinking, why I wanted you here. I want to apologize. And I want to try to fix it. In New Zealand it was all backwards and fucked-up, and it was like--what we had--was two different things, a real life and then these magical little interludes that we'd never spoil by talking about them."

Orli is nodding now, and he's looking up at Viggo. "I think I see."

Viggo clears his throat. "But what I want to say is--I wanted to try to do it right. If it's not too late. Before it was sex first and--"

Orli leans across the empty space between them, sliding sideways in one fluid graceful movement, and kisses Viggo. The movement was Elvish in its musical economy, but the kiss is awkward, Viggo's foot on the brake and his hand on the steering wheel, Orli almost sideways, the seatbelt biting into his neck. It's not the kind of kiss Viggo is accustomed to sharing in cars, front seat or back, parked or otherwise. Orli's lips are as soft and sweet as he remembers them, and they taste like he smells. The want they have always felt is there, the kind of electricity that arced between them yesterday in the rain. The passion is gentled, though.

The kiss is unbearably tender.

Orli lifts his head a centimeter, staring into Viggo's eyes. Viggo can't speak, and Orli is smiling, the expression on his face warm and full of laughter, sweet and breathless. "I know," he whispers, and his breath gusts on Viggo's upper lip.

* * *

Orli will be driving again through the dark because he likes driving at night. He will be in the habit of saying he likes to think like that. Viggo will like to sit beside him in the black silence. The road will hiss by under the wheels and the lights on the dash will glow, the only light besides the other cars' head and taillights and the occasional city, like a handful of stars beside the Interstate.

Summer nights will be their favorite kind.

Orli's sunglasses will be off, and his face will be masked in the shifting shadows that stripe the interior of the car in different colors of gray and silver and dusky black. Viggo will watch him surreptitiously, even when he doesn't realize he is doing it, out of the corner of his eye. There will be nothing in the car and nothing visible in the bottomless velvet outside the windows to hold his eyes next to Orli.

"I'm sorry," Orli will say out of nowhere, late, in Tennessee.

Viggo will think about this for a while, biting his lip and remembering. He will realize belatedly that he has not made any answer, and he'll nod and say, "I know," because it's not really okay, but that's not the issue.

He will think that this is exactly the kind of conversation Elijah probably had with his wife--sad or full of bitterness on both sides, or maybe just horribly tired of everything--before everything fell apart. He will know, though, that all the difference is in why you're sorry, and why you don't care, and whether you understand the other person really or only understand about them.

"He'll be alright," Orli will say after a while, about Elijah, of course.

Viggo will nod: "They both will," and they will both know he doesn't mean Elijah and Elijah's wife.

Viggo won't have cried for a very long time.

* * *

Viggo's hands aren't as sure of themselves as they should be on the steering wheel, driving on the Interstate. They will lose more time if they stop, but it can't be helped.

It wasn't his idea to speak.

They eat lunch in a little Mexican restaurant with murals painted on the walls. Orli gets an extra drink, either because he orders in Spanish or because the waitress has very good taste in men.

They look at each other across the small table, their feet touching underneath it, and they're grateful for the low lighting. They can't stop smiling, and they don't speak even though in the Jeep they agreed tacitly to leave the rest of their conversation for this.

_ "Es guapo, no?"_ Orli asks the waitress, indicating Viggo, when she brings their food, and she looks back and forth between them and laughs. Viggo leans back to let her put the plates on the table. He takes a bite of guacamole before he spreads some on a small hand-fried tortilla.

"I understood you," he says, looking up at Orli, just before the waitress comes back and gives him an extra drink too. She goes away again with a saucy wink and a smile, leaving Orli to laugh himself weak, tears leaking from his closed eyes, while Viggo looks at him and thinks about kissing away the little drops.

"It's so strange to think," Orli says, in between bites of Spanish rice, "that you were as confused as me."

"Or more," Viggo retorts dryly, polishing off another small fajita and licking a dribble of salsa and meat-flavored oil from the side of his thumb. Orli leans forward, breathing,

"Wait--" and Viggo looks at him inquiringly. He takes Viggo's chin in his hand across the table. Viggo feels a gentle brush at the corner of his mouth--Orli's thumb--but he doesn't see anything but Orli's eyes. Orli swallows and says huskily, "You had a--it's gone."

Viggo smiles slowly.

Orli insists on ordering flan, and the waitress brings two spoons without being asked. When she's gone away, before he picks up his spoon, he says so quietly Viggo almost can't hear: _"Desde hace años te amo."_

"Hey." Viggo reaches and catches his hand as he reaches for the spoon and they're frozen like that, fingers on stainless steel and warm flesh. When he looks up Orli's eyes are unguarded, and a smile has just died on his lips into solemnity. "Orli, I've been in love with you for a long, long time." They knew it in the car--it was what they meant and didn't say, quite, in the broken explanations and the hasty kisses they broke off. But they had to say it together--and Viggo finds it's different from thinking it, and different from all the other things you can say that mean the same.

Viggo hardly tastes the flan.

They leave the waitress a very good tip.

In the car, Orli doesn't even seem to pause in the passenger seat; he is in Viggo's lap, a warm, long-legged armful that won't quite fit in the space between the seat and the steering wheel, before his door is all the way closed. One leg is folded awkwardly on the other side of Viggo's thighs, the other in between the two front seats. Viggo is trapped in the circle of his arms, his hands braced on the seat next to Viggo's shoulders as he leans in.

Their lips just touch and they're still for a moment, their mouths closed, as they let the awareness of it shudder through them. Viggo breathes and it breaks the spell, Orli's mouth opening over his with a soft little cry, and their tongues touch and twist around each other, hot, seemingly fast and slow all at once. There's no way for them to lie as close-wrapped in each others' arms as they want to, until their limbs are mixed up and they lose themselves together. They can't even press properly close at this angle, Orli sitting in his lap and pushing desperately, writhing with frustrated passion. The movement slides into an unchoreographed dance, their hips and hands fumbling, and there isn't space for what they're doing, let alone for what they want. Orli buries his face in Viggo's neck, finally, breathing heavily.

He can feel Orli's hardness pressing into his, but they've given up, for the moment. Viggo soothes his hands up and down the slim trembling muscles of Orli's back and strokes his hair. Orli sighs and kisses his neck and says indistinctly, "We lost so much time."

"We're going to lose a lot more before tonight," Viggo points out, smiling over Orli's head and tilting his face up, seeking another kiss. Eyes closing, lips finding each other unerringly again and again for kiss after swift-short heady kiss, plush and deep. They relax into each other, not really comfortable in the awkward space and not really fitted together properly, unwilling to let that matter to the stuttering imperfect beauty of the long moments.

"We have to go," Orli says hoarsely against his mouth.

"I know," Viggo says, "I can't drive like this." Orli laughs and kisses the corner of his eye and then his cheekbone.

"God--" he murmurs, brushing his lips across Viggo's temple to his ear. "Too long." The last words vibrate into his ear.

Viggo tightens his arm around Orli's waist, and gently kisses his jaw, which is what he can reach. "Maybe we won't go quite yet."

They almost sleep, almost, but not quite, with Orli draped over Viggo in that horrible position worthy of a cat. Their heads are close together, Orli's forehead against the seat back next to Viggo's ear, so Viggo can smell his hair. For a long time, Viggo doesn't do anything but catalogue the points on his body where Orli touches him, feel their combined warmth, and savor the intangible, fragile promise of each breath.

When they're pulling out of the parking lot, having lost even more time, so that Viggo thinks they'll arrive a full day late--Orli says in a conversational tone, "I'm not leaving."

Viggo looks at him quickly.

"You," he elaborates, "I'm not leaving you."

His eyes drop, and Viggo smiles, and has to force himself to look at the road. "I hope you won't."

* * *

They will reach Chattanooga late at night, before they thought they would, not having been alerted by the customary traffic jams. The road won't be empty, either, but both lanes will be open as far ahead as they can see when Viggo realizes where they are, and they'll zip along just under the speed limit, car lengths separating them from the vehicles before and behind. The lights of Chattanooga will carpet the ground on both sides of the Interstate before they experience any real slowing, and they'll make it past in well under half an hour. Orli will speed partway.

It will be less than a third of the time they are used to it taking.

The place will be new and alien, eerily dark and silent. Viggo will feel as if he's never been there before. "They finished the roadwork," he'll say dumbly. Orli's lips will just tighten in response. Neither of them will like it, but they won't speak.

They'll stop for the night shortly after Chattanooga in the same town where Orli once whispered to Viggo _"Te amo"_ over flan in a Mexican restaurant. Tired after the long unrelenting day, but satisfied that so far they're not losing enough time to be late, Viggo will drop his duffel at the foot of the bed and stand there, rubbing his hands over his face.

He will brush past Orli on the way to the bathroom without looking at him. No word or mutual glance will have passed between them for an hour, including in the motel lobby, when Viggo emerges from the bathroom and is caught unaware by Orli's weight, pushed stumbling sideways and pinned up against the wall. His eyes will flutter closed as Orli's mouth fastens over his and he'll open himself willingly, drowning in the kiss, drowning in Orli and bringing both of his hands up to clutch the back of Orli's head, steadying his world.

Their tongues will be parched after so many bitter silences filled with grief, never sweetened with a kiss. They will not be gentle. Orli will ravage Viggo's mouth, bite his bottom lip and draw blood, and push his knee roughly, demandingly, between Viggo's legs. Viggo's fingernails will bite into the skin of Orli's back under his shirt. He'll almost tear it getting it off.

Orli will open Viggo's pants without looking and put his hand in the opening, massaging Viggo's cock through cotton. He'll fall swiftly to his knees and take Viggo deep in his mouth without preamble, beginning a slow, even rhythm. Viggo's head will bang back against the wall and he'll taste blood from Orli's possessive bite on his lip. His fingers will strain to clutch more tightly at Orli's head as a clever tongue swirls over Viggo's length inside the wet silk sheath of Orli's mouth. He'll feel fingers between his legs, and then two will push inside him and find the right spot.

Viggo will come hard with a hoarse shout, and only then will his grip on Orli's head loosen, his eyes closing, his fingers stroking idly over short hair. He'll hardly notice that it's gone. His eyes will open just after the sound of a zipper to see Orli stripping off jeans and boxers with one movement. Then Orli will take his hand, put him in the bed and crouch above him. A deep, nasty kiss later, Viggo will be practically too breathless to notice the removal of his shirt. Orli will tug his pants off in a few harsh jerks. The fabric will catch at Viggo's knee and scrape at his calf, and catch in a bunch around his left ankle. Orli will crawl between his legs then, lift his thighs high, and enter him at once.

* * *

The first time for years that they lie together, their mouths melting into one, their arms wrapped around each other, touching all up and down their bodies, is in a hotel that night in northern Georgia. The kiss occupies an ordinary instant, a perfectly normal moment of time, near the end of an ordinary winter day, before Orli moves his mouth to the soft skin under Viggo's ear and begins to suck gently there. It is unreally, astoundingly immediate, hopelessly intimate, fearlessly special. It is not an ordinary kiss, but one that owns his lips and leaves its imprint in his blood, flaying him down to raw nerves and washing them all in captive moonlight. It aches. It consecrates an otherwise pedestrian instant with its breathless stillness.

It vanishes, and Orli sucks under Viggo's ear while Viggo combs his fingers gently through Orli's hair and trails his fingers down Orli's sides, his quivering flanks. When his fingers trace the cleft of Orli's ass, Orli shudders and gasps, and Viggo kisses his forehead and one eyelid. He strokes Orli's back gently, but Orli is impatient, and he begins to thrust their pelvises gently together, their cocks rubbing and sliding past each other against the tender skin at the tops of their legs.

Viggo wraps one hand around a slender hip and slows his movement long enough to probe at the entrance to Orli's body with a finger. Orli tenses and relaxes, and when the finger has slid deep into his welcoming heat, he sighs and bites Viggo's neck. Viggo withdraws the finger, to a little moan, and replaces it with two. Another sigh.

Viggo tips them to their sides and Orli rolls off him and turns his back. The long golden length of his back is perfect, hot and smooth. His legs curl up sweetly, and he nestles the full curve of his ass against Viggo's groin, dropping his head forward. Viggo wraps one arm around Orli and puts the other on his hip to steady him. After he has found the right angle and thrust in, Orli making soft encouraging groans in his throat, he catches Orli's hand in his and their fingers twine together. Viggo pushes up a little further, but Orli tilts his hips and takes him deeper.

It feels like Orli is claiming him, not the other way around, when they are fully joined, Viggo folded in the hot depth of Orli's body. He presses a kiss on the nape of Orli's neck and rocks out and in twice, short shallow thrusts, emphatically.

"Mmmmmmmm," says Orli, and turns his head, begging for a kiss which Viggo drops on his swollen lips.

Maybe they are claiming each other.

Viggo would make love long and slowly, drawing the pleasure out as long as possible. Orli is impatient. "No," he whispers when Viggo slows again, and pushes himself back suggestively against Viggo. He tightens around Viggo hungrily, and says, "We have all night. Come on--" and Viggo can't resist. His voice is low and breathy, warm, pitched just for Viggo, so it makes his throat ache and melts his stomach into a tangled mess. He lets Orli set a rhythm of long, powerful thrusts, and soon they can't control it anymore, eyes closed and lips sealed imperfectly together in an awkward over-the-shoulder kiss as they speed up erratically, crying out at each new bit of pleasure.

They lie still a long time, with Viggo curled around Orli, but before they sleep they make love again with Orli stretched out on his stomach, his hips propped on a pillow. Viggo bends over him, and he takes him as gently as he can, slowly and surely, kissing the back of his neck when he enters him. Orli moans and rocks into the pillows, but he can't get leverage to try to make Viggo go faster. Viggo is not convinced he would if he could, though.

Each thrust is long and careful. At first Viggo rests a while between each one, letting pleasure steal over them slowly and ebb again while he touches all of Orli that he can reach with his hands. He wants to learn every inch of Orli's skin, the way it jumps under his touch, where it is so sensitive that Orli arches his back, where it makes him whimper Viggo's name.

A steady pace gradually builds, and he goes in more deeply with harder thrusts. Orli's muscles clench around him. He's lost, in a fever of Orli, golden, lamplight, blood heat, sheets tangled, and so, so long, too long, since he saw this place. He recognizes it now if he didn't then. Both their faces are wet.

* * *

Viggo will gasp, eyes closed and mouth open, his back arching helplessly off the bed as Orli drives deliberately deep. He'll be aroused beyond the feel of pain, sobbing and rising to meet each thrust, but Orli will be panting harshly, eyes glazed, going much too fast for him to keep up. He'll be gorgeous lost in his pleasure, flushed, painted red and gold in the light of the bedside lamp. Finally, with three deep thrusts and a low groan, Orli will come, his release pulsing hot and wet deep inside, the muscles in his forearms standing out in relief as he leans on them.

He will lean there, his eyes closed, lips parted, like an unreal fantasy of a kiss, for endless frozen moments until Viggo can feel him begin to soften. Then he'll pull back slowly, disentangling their legs very, very carefully and lying down as carefully next to Viggo, one piece at a time relaxing into the mattress. He will be lying on his stomach, his face turned towards Viggo, and Viggo will watch a slow shudder grip him and ripple through his whole body.

There will be a tear on his cheek.

Viggo will lean in and kiss it gently away, and Orli's eyes won't open when Viggo gathers him into his arms, cradling him as close as they can get.

"Shh," Viggo will whisper, "Shhhhh. It's alright."

"Even if it works out for him," Orli whispers. "Even then, it will be like--God, like so long without you, but worse, for Elijah. I can't imagine. The pain--"

Viggo will nod, helplessly, and kiss Orli's cheek and the corner of his mouth.

Orli will sigh and relax a little, and return the kiss. "He could have been happier. If he'd just stayed with her, tried to make it work for longer, instead--he doesn't have to _just_ wait."

Viggo won't say anything for a long time. He'll just pet Orli's back in long strokes down the curl of his spine, and as they cool off, he will reach down for a blanket and pull it up over them. The warmth will slowly penetrate, and Orli will hug Viggo more tightly for a moment, and shift his head on Viggo's shoulder. "He knows," Viggo will whisper. "He's doing the right thing."

He will think Orli is asleep when he murmurs, "How can he stand it."

Orli will not be asleep, and he will say stickily against Viggo's collarbone--"He's so in love he can't do anything _but_ wait."

"I don't understand it."

"Yes, you do," Orli will say, "And so do I," and he will fall asleep.

* * *

Orli wakes him up in the middle of the night with a soft kiss, eyes closed, mouth closed, lips clinging, damp and ragged, breathy. He floats out of his dream and knows nothing but the feel of Orli's mouth. It is pitch black, double curtains drawn and all the lamps off. He lifts his arms and draws Orli down to him. They both smile. Viggo does not know if his eyes are open or closed.

He can't see Orli's hand before it finds the apex of his legs and wraps around his cock. There is only the darkness, Orli's mouth and that feather-light touch. Orli pauses for permission and Viggo whispers "yes," spreading his legs apart. Their kiss breaks and goes on, and he feels nothing, then a light caress on his thigh, another. Then fingertips teasing him, sliding in slowly, damp with something--saliva. Gone. Then heat, the blunt head of Orli's cock, sliding, scorching friction, his body coming alive, parting to welcome Orli after so long, wrapping around him, taking him deep.

Orli and Viggo shift back and forth, kissing and gasping and sighing, for a long time, content with slow tenderness, the gentle caress of their hands re-learning each other by feel and the less gentle caress of the movement at the place of their joining. Kissing, eyes closed, after long enough makes the shifting darkness behind his eyelids coalesce into running water, silver light, colors dancing, Orli's laughter and summer and winter wind. They whisper their pleasure into the kiss, and when they come, they shout it, hoarse and low.

Viggo kisses Orli tenderly, finding each closed eyelid easily in the darkness, and then lets Orli's mouth settle over his again with a sigh. Orli pulls out and they pull the blankets up again. The embrace of the darkness and the embrace of the bedclothes bleed together with the heat of Orli's arms around him.

"I won't leave you either," Viggo says. Orli kisses his neck sleepily, smooths a hand through his hair. They sleep. It's alright.

End


End file.
